The Uyghur Transitional Justice Database is honored to announce the launch of its third book in the Uyghur language, The Untold Stories of the Uyghurs, with its official presentation taking place on January 10 in Istanbul, Türkiye.
The recent history of the Uyghur people is a saga deeply intertwined with pain, suffering, and hope. The Untold Stories of the Uyghurs is a series of unvarnished and factual accounts of that saga – narrated by witnesses themselves. This book brings together the voices of a generation that has endured systematic oppression and racial discrimination in East Turkistan from the early 1950s to the present.
The book documents pivotal and traumatic periods, including the Land Reform campaigns, the Great Cultural Revolution, the Central Asian Migration Wave, the Gulja Massacre, the July 5 Urumqi Massacre, and the large-scale repression that intensified after 2014. Each account stands as a record of lived experience, preserving memory where silence was imposed.
History is preserved in the voices of witnesses.
This book is a living testimony. It exists to remember pain and suffering, to preserve them as evidence, and to ensure that the experiences of an entire people are not erased. The stories that prison walls and labor camps could not silence are now being revealed to the world.
As readers turn these pages, they will hear not only the pain born of decades of oppression, but also the unquenchable voice of resistance – a people who refused to bow even under the harshest conditions. Within these testimonies lives an enduring and immortal spirit.
Preserving a people’s past is saving its future.
With this Uyghur-language edition, we reaffirm our commitment to safeguarding memory, amplifying silenced voices, and passing this truth to future generations.